The greatest weapon we have to combat stress is the ability to choose our thoughts.
Interpretation
Our thoughts hold power over our stress levels, and we can choose them.
William James emphasizes the profound impact of our thoughts on our mental state, particularly concerning stress. In this quote, he suggests that while we cannot always control external circumstances, we can exercise the power of choice over our thoughts, which can help mitigate the feelings of stress we experience in life.
In practice
In a motivational speech about managing stress in the workplace.
Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.
The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
With an open mind, seek and listen to all the highest ideals. Consider the most enlightened thoughts. Then choose your path, person by person, each for oneself.
Hardships make us strong. Problems give birth to wisdom. Sorrows cultivate compassion. Those who have suffered the most will become the happiest.
If you hunger for certain types of clothes, for which you have little use, put yourself on a diet. Just as you resist too much whipped cream and French pastry to keep your figure in shape, you can say no to those yearned-for but unneeded purchases that lead to a wardrobe that is shapeless and without form.
A ray of imagination or of wisdom may enlighten the universe, and glow into remotest centuries.
Are you still to learn that the end and perfection of our victories is to avoid the vices and infirmities of those whom we subdue?
Ignorance, when it is voluntary, is criminal; and he may be properly charged with evil who refused to learn how he might prevent it.
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